Bad Swipe Bad Swipe (Billionaire's Club #12) - Elise Faber Page 0,51
had two months’ worth, in case you were wondering.”
His lips quirked. “Yeah?”
She nodded, grinning at her own silliness. “Yeah.”
He lifted her hand, pressed a kiss to the back of it. “Well, that sounds like a good start.”
The server came with their food then, but the words were pinging around her brain. Simple words, but they unlocked something inside her. Because it was a start, and even if it would have an end, if she spent all her time being focused on it, then she was missing out on the now.
Missing out on the good times they were having.
Not that she was doing it every moment, but she was spending enough time worrying about it to pull her away from Ben, from her friends, from the fun and loveliness of now.
She dropped her hand to his thigh, leaned up to kiss his cheek.
He turned his head, eyes blazing.
“A good start,” she agreed.
Those knuckles found her throat, brushing lightly over her skin. “Eat, honey. Put those Hoovering skills to work.”
Her heart kicked against her ribs, love blossomed somewhere deep inside her.
But she didn’t panic.
Instead, she embraced the feeling . . . and got down to eating her fajitas.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ben
Stef smelled like heaven as she leaned against him, riding the elevator all the way to the top of the Hunt Inc. building.
The reason he hadn’t been worried about how long dinner would take.
He’d just wanted to bring her here.
To show her this.
The elevator doors opened into a dim hallway, and she slowed, lifting an eyebrow. “Um, so you don’t have a creepy serial killer basement, but you have a creepy, dark hallway instead?”
He tugged a lock of her hair. “Just a short one.”
“That’s what she said.”
He burst out laughing, shook his head, and stepped ahead of her to push open the door at the end of it.
“Oh,” she murmured.
And he knew the feeling. It was the same one that he’d had when he’d first come up here after he’d bought the building.
Now it had been spruced up.
A safety railing added, several couches on one side, a table between them. Even an outdoor heater.
But the suave furnishings weren’t what he wanted to show her.
Instead, it was the view.
“Wow,” she said, when he’d taken her hand and coaxed her out. She still wore his jacket, hadn’t taken it off since he’d settled it on her shoulders. “This is amazing.”
He brought her to the railing, to the view that had taken his breath from the first moment he’d seen it. The lights of San Francisco glowed in the distance, some twinkling and bright, others more muted by the curls of fog coming in from the ocean. The Golden Gate was to the north, the lights of the East Bay visible on the other side of the inlet of water.
“I grew up there,” he said softly.
Stef turned from where she’d been looking at the Golden Gate and curled into his side. “Across the Bay?”
He nodded. “In Hayward.”
“I haven’t heard of it.”
He tugged a lock of her hair. “I forget that you didn’t grow up here. It’s a smaller city between San Jose and Oakland. Great place when I was a kid, but it changed when I got older.”
“In what way?”
“Got bigger, felt less like that small town, and . . .” The words got stuck in his throat, but she just waited for him to find his voice again. “It was still home. I loved the hills and the downtown. We had a special curb.”
Her head tilted to the side as she glanced up at him with questions in her eyes. “A curb?”
He flashed a smile. “Yup.”
“C-u-r-b? As in one you stepped off.” Her brows drew together. “I’m struggling to understand the significance.”
Laughter flowed up his throat, filled the air around them. “It was built on a fault line, so every year it moved, separating from the sidewalk, jutting out a little more.” He shrugged. “It was always cool to go see it and measure it, to see how many millimeters it moved from one year to the next. A stupid thing, but my mom and I would keep track of our measurements in a notebook. We’d be so freaking careful to make sure we took them in the same exact spot. And my dad would be sitting on a bench across the street, a stack of books from the library in his arms, reading through one as we fussed.”
“That sounds really nice.”
“It was.” A beat. “Until they fixed the curb, and we couldn’t measure anymore.”